Coordinating Entrainment Phenomena: Robot Conversation Strategy for Object Recognition

Abstract

This study proposes a robot conversation strategy involving speech and gestures to improve a robot’s indicated object recognition, i.e., the recognition of an object indicated by a human. Research conducted to improve the performance of indicated object recognition is divided into two main approaches: development and interactive. The development approach addresses the development of new devices or algorithms. Through human–robot interaction, the interactive approach improves the performance by decreasing the variability and the ambiguity of the references. Inspired by the findings of entrainment and entrainment inhibition, this study proposes a robot conversation strategy that utilizes the interactive approach. While entrainment is a phenomenon in which people unconsciously tend to mimic words and/or gestures of their interlocutor, entrainment inhibition is the opposite phenomenon in which people decrease the amount of information contained in their words and gestures when their interlocutor provides excess information. Based on these phenomena, we designed a robot conversation strategy that elicits clear references. We experimentally compared this strategy with the other interactive strategy in which a robot explicitly requests clarifications when a human refers to an object. We obtained the following findings: (1) The proposed strategy clarifies human references and improves indicated object recognition performance, and (2) the proposed strategy forms better impressions than the other interactive strategy that explicitly requests clarifications when people refer to objects.